Matthew Dillon has been doing a significant amount of work on cache lines, and I haven’t been linking to it because it’s hard to point at single commits with such a technical subject. However, he’s summarized it all, along with news on NUMA handling and vkernel improvements.
The again-early BSDNow episode this week has an interview with Tom Jones about BSD Sockets, plus a number of news items that include something new to me: playonBSD.
Matthew Dillon moved some locks and exec() performance jumped up significantly – 50% or more. This is a single system call, so I don’t know how much translates through to real performance change, but it’s interesting to see.
The normal monthly meeting for NYCBUG for March 1st (tomorrow) is canceled; next month’s meeting is still on.
BSD author Michael W. Lucas is talking at the Troy Public Library (Michigan, not New York) tonight, about his nonfiction writing. Go, if you like his books and/or if you are thinking about technical writing for yourself. He has another appearance coming up on March 11th.
Reminder: the 2017 FreeBSD Storage Summit is tomorrow.
Another diverse link week, hooray!
- Stupid Hackathon 2017 – results under Project. (via)
- using yubikeys everywhere
- Mistakes You Apparently Just Have to Make Yourself. I have seen all of these happen. (via)
- Getting started with vim. (via)
- The many faces of grep. grep, egrep, fgrep.
- Finding the Lost Vikings – Reversing a Virtual Machine. (via)
- Unix OS archaeology – Soviet UNIX clone DEMOS pt.2. (via)
- SHAttered. Every vulnerability has to have a cool name and website now. (via)
- I found the best anagram in English, Moore’s law beats a better algorithm, and Miscellaneous notes on anagram scoring, a series on anagrams that goes into glorious depth.
- Puzzle Zapper Blog, from the previous link.
- PuTTY 0.68 has been released, useful everywhere. (via and via)
Your unrelated item of the week: How Wegmans inspired the most rabid fanbase in the grocery world. I live in the town where Wegmans started. “Grocery fanbase” is a relative thing, but: yes, they are that good.
I measure the success of In Other BSDs by how many different BSD flavors I can reference. This is a good week.
- Was thinking of switching to a BSD on my Thinkpad 11e, do you think this is a good idea?
- Adblock on Pfsense
- pfSense 2.3.3 RELEASE Now Available!
- Review of RaspBSD (FreeBSD for Raspberry Pi computers)
- NetBSD fully reproducible builds (via)
- mandoc-1.14.1 released.
- OpenBSD kernel lock removal for IPv4 forwarding. (via #dragonflybsd)
- OPNsense 17.1.2 released.
- OpenBSD Foundation 2016 Fundraising.
- What happened to my vlan? (OpenBSD network performance, via)
- GhostBSD version 11 Alpha 1.
- NetBSD at the upcoming AsiaBSDCon 2017.
- Now available: video recording of the recent “OS : The underlying overhead of computation” presentation at NYCBUG. (via)
- Options to rid ourselves of MS Windows “servers”.
- Easy pkgsrc on macOS with pkg_comp 2.0.
- NetBSD 7.1_RC2 available.
- The Heirloom Project. Chunks of that code are probably still present in all the BSDs. (via)
- features are faults redux. Pseudo-transcript of a tedu speech not exactly about OpenBSD, but has plenty of funny one-liners.
- “Hi, I’m jkh and I’m a d**k” I don’t 100% agree with the idea, but it’s still a good plan.
There’s the DragonFly syntax for loader hints, and there’s the FreeBSD syntax. If you happen to use the FreeBSD syntax on DragonFly, it’ll still work.
This week’s BSDNow runs across a wide range of topics, so it’s worth browsing through. There’s no interview this week, but there is a report on an interview, if that’s meta enough for you.
Thanks to Imre Vadasz, the virtio driver in DragonFly now has PCI MSI-X support. This should help with virtual performance, though I say that on principle, not with any actual numbers to back it up.
Here’s one of the reasons to have your own permanent server: The New York Times has a daily feature called, not surprisingly, “The Daily“. It’s a short 15-20 minute news segment, ready by 6 AM. It’s available through Google Play Music or iTunes, but I leave for work by 6:15, and I don’t want to use up cell data downloading something that should arrive on my phone just before I leave the house. Of course, there’s no obvious way to tell Google Play, “I know it’s there; go get it right now”. I don’t know the iPhone experience, but I imagine it’s the same. I want to download on my time, not on Google or Apple’s schedule.
Luckily, there’s an RSS feed for this podcast. That, plus this simple script on my DragonFly system, means I can pull it down whenever I’m ready:
fetch -o – http://feeds.podtrac.com/zKq6WZZLTlbM | grep enclosure | cut -d ‘”‘ -f2 | xargs fetch -m
So, it’s a matter of running that script, and syncing off my own local storage, on my own schedule. FolderSync Lite will happily sync back to my phone using sftp.
If you are anywhere near KnoxBUG’s meeting place (mid-Tennessee, US), Joe Maloney will be presenting on OpenRC and TrueOS, tomorrow night. See the link for address and times.
It’s Lazy Reading Science week!
- RC40 card cipher
- mplayer ktracing “In my ongoing quest to find the most inefficient software that still appears to work…”
- How New York City Gets Its Electricity. Smart meters have been possible for years… Electricity companies are just not interested. (via)
- Posix Has Become Outdated. Note that I don’t necessarily agree. (PDF, via)
- Computer Science Professor Stages a Play to Teach his Family Perl 6. (via)
- Why Wang went wrong.
- swayvm, a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager, for Wayland. (via)
- I LOVE PROGRAMMING, the sticker. (via)
- Laws of the Universe: Perlin Noise.
- Undefined Behavior != Unsafe Programming.
- A new version of Producing Open Source Software is out. (via)
- JS/UIX, “an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers”. (via)
- newspaper subscription experiment
- How I got three errors into one line of code and followup.
- Same author and related: Automatically checking for syntax errors with Git’s pre-commit hook
- Pipelining your laundry, and the ensuing silliness
Your unrelated link of the day: Assault Trombone. Even if this was lethal, I couldn’t take it seriously. (via)
Lots of storage this week.
- OpenBSD as a Multimedia Desktop
- Firefox 51 on sparc64 – we did not hit the wall yet (via)
- Current health of the BSD Certification Group?
- When did tar start auto-assuming -z? Mild GNU vs. BSD argument.
- Introducing pkg_comp 2.0 (and sandboxctl 1.0)
- FreeNAS/OpenZFS training.
- Michael W. Lucas at the Troy Public Library. Talking about his nonfiction writing.
- 2017 FreeBSD Storage Summit, coming up in 9 days. I’ll post a reminder. (via)
- Related: TrueNAS does S3.
- FreeBSD 12 Looking At Dropping SVR4 Binary Compatibility. Would anyone notice? (via)
- Choose as a contributor: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or other BSD
- Using device.hints to wire physical devices to specific names.
Are you on DragonFly-master? Are you using a Realtek network device? Sepherosa Ziehau has an update he would like you to test.
There was some issues with the DPorts repo, so you may need to reset your local copy. This only applies if you pulled down a copy in the last 48 hours or so. (update: or less, based on John’s comment) Otherwise, you are fine.
This week’s BSDNow has notes about the FOSDEM BSD Devroom, and a triple-shot of Brian Cantrill – all three interviews with him. If you’ve been watching BSDNow for a very long time, you may have seen one or several of them, but this is one long replay of all the interviews of an opinionated and lively speaker. (The first interview’s original episode is titled “Ubuntu Slaughters Kittens” for a reason.)
Rimvydas Jasinskas posted an extended description of what’s happening with dports. There’s a significant xorg reformatting coming in ports, which is going to be absorbed into dports, but it may take some time. There’s also an odd loss of commit rights for John Marino, who commits (frequently!) to both DragonFly and FreeBSD. (His followup) This all translates to some upcoming transition time for dports to accommodate these changes.
Note that if you are using dports binaries, especially on DragonFly 4.6 release, this won’t really affect you; the way dports is set up, binary sets always work. It is interesting to hear about future work, in any case.
This recent CPU frequency change will make your Skylake-using laptop much easier to deal with. Apparently this is a common problem with Skylake? (links via EFNet #dragonflybsd)